Next, we show that another known result of Bollobás and Thomason and of Komlós and Szemerédi provides an bound on the approximation factor for the maximum homeomorphic clique achievable in polynomial time. On the other hand, we show an Ω(n1/2−O(1/(logn)γ)) lower bound (for some constant γ, unless ) on the best approximation factor achievable efficiently for the maximum homeomorphic clique problem, nearly matching our upper bound. Finally, we derive an interesting trade-off between approximability and subexponential time for the problem of subgraph homeomorphism where the guest graph has maximum degree not exceeding three and low treewidth.